Richard Titmuss. Stewart, John
Harris suggests that the influence was probably by way of a process of diffusion, rather than direct: ‘Thucydides’, p 141.
64Marshall, Social Policy, pp 75, 7.
65R.M. Titmuss, ‘War and Social Policy’, in Essays on ‘The Welfare State’, London, George Allen and Unwin, 3rd edn 1976, pp 75, 76–7, 78–81, 85–7.
66J. Harris, ‘War and Social History: Britain and the Home Front during the Second World War’, Contemporary European History, 1, 1, 1992, p 31, n 43.
67TITMUSS/2/163, typescript ‘The Social Services’, nd but first half of the 1950s, pp 8, 1.
68C.L. Mowat, ‘The Approach to the Welfare State in Great Britain’, The American Historical Review, 58, 1, 1952, pp 61–2.
69Harris, ‘War and Social History’ pp 18, 31ff.
70B. Harris, The Health of the Schoolchild: A History of the School Medical Service in England and Wales, Buckingham, Open University Press, 1995, p 156.
71Harris, ‘Thucydides’, p 141.
72R. McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–1951, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p 123ff.
73D. Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History, London, Allen Lane, 2018, p 223.
74T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1950.
75Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, p 257.
76W.R. Matthews, St Paul’s Cathedral in Wartime, London, Hutchison, 1946, Appendices 1 and 3. Appendix 2 gives an account of a typical night’s work.
77Sir K. Hancock, ‘Richard Titmuss’, letter to The Times, 15 May 1973, p 18.
78TITMUSS/7/53, letter, 13 September 1945, A.S.G. Butler to RMT.
79D. Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle 1937–1941, London, Allen Lane, 2016, p 512.
80Oakley, Man and Wife, p 150, cited p 234, cited p 241, cited p 251.
81Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, p 323.
Titmuss and the Eugenics Society in war
In the course of the 1940s, Titmuss continued to play an active part in the Eugenics Society which, as we saw in Chapter 4, he had joined in the late 1930s. This was prompted by his interest in population and population health. But it likewise afforded him the opportunity to network with well-connected individuals who were to become important figures in promoting his career, such as Carr-Saunders and Hubback. This chapter examines Titmuss’s work for the Society during the Second World War, especially from early 1942. He was editor of Eugenics Review for the first two editions of that year, standing in for Maurice Newfield while he was unwell. From the outbreak to the end of the war he also contributed six articles and a number of book reviews to the journal, as well as taking to task, in the correspondence columns and in debate, critics of his own approach to population issues. He participated in Society meetings, during the early part of the war was on its Emergency Committee, and by the end he was on its council, the latter an elected position. Titmuss published his third book, Birth, Poverty and Wealth: A Study of Infant Mortality, with Eugenics Society support. He was also co-opted, in 1943, onto the Population Investigation Committee (PIC), set up by the Eugenics Society in the mid-1930s.
Committee man, editor, and contributor
With the outbreak of war one immediate consequence for the Eugenics Society was that C.P. Blacker was called up to the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), so depriving the organisation of one of its most active members and administrators. An emergency meeting of the council was called shortly afterwards. It was agreed to set up an Emergency Committee, chaired by Lord Horder, of ‘nine members able to attend regularly, with power to co-opt’, which would ‘act on behalf of Council for the duration of the war’. Titmuss was one of these, as were Carr-Saunders and Hubback.1 He was undoubtedly in favour of the creation of the Emergency Committee, telling Ursula Grant-Duff in mid-September that there was an overriding need to ‘see that the work of the Eugenics Society is kept alive’.2 And as we saw in Chapter 4, he was soon in demand as a source of information, being requested to provide the next meeting of the Emergency Committee with proposals for children’s allowances, and his findings on the physical condition of the army.
Titmuss was clearly becoming an active figure in the Society, something further recognised by his membership of the Homes in Canada Service Committee. This small body originated when the Society’s Canadian sister organisation offered to receive child evacuees. It was to identify ‘certain eugenically important groups’ not presently covered by the British government’s own overseas evacuation scheme. An example of such a neglected group would be children who had won scholarships to non-grant-aided schools (that is, not a ‘traditional’ grammar school), and the criteria for selection were ‘intelligence, good heredity and good health’. A panel of doctors had been approved by the Homes in Canada Service Committee to apply these ‘fundamental eugenic safeguards’. Superficially, it seems surprising that Titmuss should have become associated with such an apparently conservative eugenic project. However, it was also explained that the committee had ‘resolved … that poverty alone will in no case be allowed to stand in the way of any parent who wished to take advantage of Canadian hospitality’. Clearly sensitive about this issue, it was further stressed that the Eugenics Society had established a fund, for which it was also issuing an appeal, so that ‘none of the selected children should be kept back by reason of poverty’.3 It seems likely that Titmuss had some say in this formulation, and it is notable that the committee was chaired by another reform eugenicist, C.F. Chance. To put it another way, the notion that a child from a poor background could nonetheless be intelligent would have run counter to the sort of eugenics decried by Titmuss.
Titmuss